A Step So Grave

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘I can’t follow that,’ I said. Then: ‘Grant, were you listening?’

  ‘Very handy, serving tea under the landing,’ she said. ‘The sound carried up the stairs quite nicely and I have sharp ears, madam, as you know. Someone’s coming,’ she added, as if to prove it to me.

  There was just a suggestion of a knock at my door and Alec sidled in.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘What do you make of that then?’

  ‘How did you find me?’ I said. ‘Alec, for heaven’s sake don’t tell me you asked a servant which bedroom was mine!’

  ‘I’m like a homing pigeon, Dan,’ Alec said, throwing himself into a little sofa. ‘I can always find you. But never mind that. How did you stop your jaw from hitting the floor?’

  ‘When Lord Ross admitted that he was secretly able to walk the day his wife was killed by a non-existent passing stranger?’

  ‘For starters. But also, what do you think of them throwing a party and setting the date for this summer? Is it just me being too sentimental or does it seem a bit callous?’

  ‘It seems like the most heartless outrage I’ve ever heard of,’ I said.

  ‘Me too,’ said Grant. ‘Can I start unpacking, madam? Or would you rather I waited?’ She waggled her eyebrows in Alec’s direction.

  ‘Avert your eyes from my undergarments, Alec dear,’ I said. ‘I don’t know that the callousness is suspect, though. It’s so blatant, I don’t know if it doesn’t perhaps scream innocence.’

  ‘But whose?’ said Alec. He was averting his eyes by way of filling and lighting his pipe. I thought of vetoing it in my bedroom, but it does help him think. ‘If one innocent person says “Lady Love would want it” perhaps the guilty person or persons can’t work out whether to agree or demur.’

  He had just got to the end of this speech when my door opened again and Teddy appeared.

  ‘Ma?’ he said. ‘Oh, a party. Listen, talking of parties … have you heard that the Dunnochs are pushing for a June wedding? That footman, Lairdie, just told me. Doesn’t it seem a bit off to you?’

  ‘It does,’ I said. ‘Don’t call me “Ma”.’

  ‘It’s a bit tight too,’ he said, ignoring me. ‘I mean, I’m assuming that you’re not going to actually wheel Donald down the aisle before we’ve found out if one of this lot bumped off the old girl?’

  ‘Teddy, your language!’ I said. ‘And no, of course not. We’re going to be very sure to detach Donald from Mallory if we find out that one of the Dunnochs “bumped off the old girl”. Rest assured.’

  ‘Or Tibballs,’ said Teddy. ‘They’re all as thick as thieves and it would make no odds. Maybe they’re all in it together. Should we be locking our doors at night in case they’re not finished?’

  I opened my mouth to scold him, but before I could begin my door was opening again. Hugh’s body appeared, leaving his head out in the corridor, then quick as a fish he pulled his head in and slammed the door shut. He turned the key.

  ‘Dandy?’ he said, turning. ‘Oh!’

  ‘We know,’ I said.

  ‘Do you think anyone told the police?’ Hugh said. ‘That the stranger striding about out on the moor, who looked a bit like Ross, was probably Ross himself practising for the big birthday surprise?’

  Alec whistled. ‘I never thought of that bit,’ he said.

  ‘Surely Cherry would recognise her own father?’ I said.

  ‘She did recognise him,’ said Grant. ‘You said as much to me, madam. She came pelting back because she thought she’d seen a vision of her father, foretelling his death.’

  ‘Will this be enough to tip the police out of their “passing tramp” nonsense?’ Alec said.

  ‘There is much to be learned,’ said Hugh, sounding like an ancient oracle. I saw Grant bite her cheeks.

  ‘And let’s make sure Donald doesn’t hear any of what we’re saying,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’ said Hugh. ‘Surely the boy needs to be on his guard.’

  ‘Because,’ I said, ‘he’s not that good an actor.’

  ‘He did a pretty splendid job acting the lovesick pup when we arrived,’ Hugh insisted.

  ‘As I said, I think, with Lady Love out of the picture, he has really and truly lost his heart to Mallory.’

  ‘He can’t marry her,’ said Hugh. ‘Not with all of this hanging over their heads.’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘We shall solve the murder and then we shall see. But, while I’ve got you all here, I need to say this. Leave it to Alec and me. Do not meddle.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ Teddy said.

  ‘Hugh?’ I said. ‘Promise me you’ll keep out of it. It’s not that you aren’t capable, but if we go asking the same questions you’ve asked already, the suspects will begin to smell a rat.’

  ‘I shall keep my mouth shut, my ears pinned back and my eyes peeled,’ Hugh said.

  ‘And you, Grant,’ I said.

  ‘But I’m an assistant detective,’ she said. ‘I’m only undercover as a lady’s maid these days.’

  It was news to me. But I had had enough years with Grant to know her weaknesses. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Only I was thinking, with your role as lady’s maid to the fore, you might offer your services to Miss Dunnoch. Her with her wedding coming and no mother to help her.’

  Grant’s eyes gleamed. The thought of a wedding dress and honeymoon trousseau was irresistible.

  ‘I shall report to you if I hear anything,’ she said. ‘From undercover, as I suggested.’

  ‘And now we’d better get back out,’ said Alec, ‘before we’re all missed.’

  They left in reverse order: Hugh slipping away first, then Teddy, Alec next, followed by Grant and finally me. As I shut the door and walked towards the head of the stairs, though, I felt that prickling sensation I knew came from eyes following me. I took my handkerchief from my pocket and dropped it, then tried surreptitiously to take a good look around as I bent to pick it up again.

  An indistinct figure stood in the shadows at the turn of the passageway. It was female. I was sure of that much. But whether it was Biddy, Mallory or Cherry I had no idea. As to what whoever it was would make of the mass exodus from my bedroom, that was anyone’s guess.

  When I was halfway back to the ground floor, a shiver passed through me. It was undoubtedly caused by a draught from the tall and uncurtained landing window, but it might have been helped just a touch by a sudden notion that it was the ghost of Lady Love who had been standing in the shadows there.

  11

  The next morning dawned bright and clear, as fine a Good Friday as I had ever seen in Scotland. When I looked out of my window, the bay was like a duck pond.

  ‘I wondered if you’d care to take a turn around the policies with me, Hugh,’ Lord Ross said at breakfast. ‘I’d appreciate your advice about some of my newest saplings. My steward assured me there was no need to drain – we have natural drainage down a dry waterfall to a deep pool below it – but they’re not looking very happy.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything I’d rather do,’ said Hugh. I knew he meant it. To march about a forest telling its owner where he had gone wrong was pretty much a trip to Paris for the spring modes to my husband.

  ‘I’ll take my chair if you don’t mind helping,’ said Lord Ross. ‘Dickie is needed elsewhere this morning.’ He waved a hand as Dickie Tibball started to offer apologies. ‘I’m all right on the way up, strangely, but coming down the steep bits sets me wobbling.’

  ‘Glady, gladly,’ Hugh said. ‘How about you, Osborne?’

  ‘Oh, I’m promised to Dandy,’ Alec said, hastily. ‘Isn’t that right?’

  I gave a stiff smile. The Dunnochs knew that Alec and I were detectives but I did not care to draw attention to our partnership too baldly. ‘Yes, thank you Alec,’ I said. ‘I wanted to take a walk to the graveyard to pay my respects and I’d rather not go alone.’

  Lord Ross nodded solemnly and Hugh gave me a look as though I were one of his dogs and I had just
been caught napping in an armchair.

  ‘She’s in the family plot,’ Ross said. ‘Top of the hill behind the house, Dandy. And take some flowers, won’t you? McReadie will tell you what’s ready to cut.’

  I was glad to have the excuse to go out into the garden and find Mr McReadie. For one thing, a devoted servant was at the top of the list of people I needed to speak to, and I also wanted to see what the turn of season had wrought in Lady Love’s precious apple labyrinth.

  Even expecting something wondrous as we were, it took my breath away when Alec, Bunty and I stepped out of the door onto the terrace and drank in the view before us. The winding arbours and pergolas that had been bare branches in the snow when I saw them last were now a riot of blossom, sweet-scented and alive with early bumblebees. A very light breeze sent just a few petals swirling down now and then and so, as I stepped onto the beginning of the labyrinth path, I felt like a bride walking below crossed swords and showered in confetti.

  ‘It’s heartbreaking that she’s not here to see it,’ I said.

  ‘And smell it,’ said Alec. ‘I’ve never thought of apple blossom as particularly strong but I suppose when you get so much of it all together like this.’ He breathed deeply. ‘And the bluebells too.’ Right enough, all along the feet of the apple trees, hiding those ugly knuckles where the grafts had been done, there were nodding bluebell heads.

  ‘It’s very early,’ I said. ‘I wonder if these are a special Applecross strain or if it’s just a sheltered spot.’

  ‘You sound like Hugh,’ said Alec. ‘Will this path take us right past where Lady Love died?’

  ‘Unless we divert now and go round the edge,’ I said. ‘But I want to see what if any marker they might have put there.’

  Another couple of turns brought us to the little knot garden at the centre of the orchard. I supposed it was an orchard in its way. I stopped walking and felt Alec stiffen beside me.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he said softly.

  McReadie, the gardener, was where I had seen him last, kneeling on the path, reaching over one of the little woven apple hurdles to work at something in one of the beds. He must have heard us approaching but he did not rise or even turn. His back was bent and his head bowed.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said and, as he sat back on his heels, I discovered why his head had been so low. The man had rivers of tears pouring down his weather-beaten cheeks.

  ‘She loved this time of year more than any other,’ he said.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I replied. ‘Alec, this is Samuel McReadie. Lady Ross’s gardener.’

  ‘It must be awful,’ Alec said. ‘The first blossom season without her.’

  ‘Aye, home’s bad,’ said McReadie. ‘But journeying will be worse. I was to find the plant she had hoped for all her days and I cannut face it now. But then staying put would like to break my heart.’ The old man rubbed the back of his hand across his face, removing the tears but introducing a smear of mud in their place. ‘I cannut imagine what the harvest’ll be like,’ he said. ‘We’ve got three good trees out in the testing ground we’ve been waiting to taste the fruits of. I could just take an axe to them some days.’

  I felt my eyes open wide. After all, someone had taken an axe – or some sort of blade anyway – to Lavinia. McReadie sniffed and wiped his eyes again, spreading the mud. Bunty, the darling that she was, saw that here was a fellow creature in distress and tugged on her lead until I let go. She went over and leaned against the old man, rubbing the side of her head on his shoulder and making the snuffling noises that were her deepest expression of affection and sympathy.

  ‘But Miss Cherry’s coming round to it,’ McReadie said, rallying a little. I thought he was responding to Bunty’s succour without even knowing it. ‘She’ll never be half the gardener her mother was but she cares enough about the place to keep it going at least.’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ said Alec. ‘Surely all at Applecross will work to keep Lady Love’s legacy alive?’

  McReadie opened his mouth to answer but then, just in time, seemed to realise that he was about to wash dirty linen. ‘They’ve all been very good to Mrs and me,’ he said. ‘You’ll have heard about our boy.’

  ‘Indeed,’ I said.

  ‘And never a word about his lordship’s ailments all these years since. Never a word about what it costs to keep the lad down there for his studies. Yes, they were very good to me and mine.’

  He was holding a hand trowel and he stuck it into the earth with a savageness that did not match his words. Bunty wrinkled her brows and came back to stand beside me. I took the loop of her lead over my hand again. Of course, I knew little of gardens and perhaps he was chopping some creeping pest into two bits before it could feast on the lush shoots of new growth that were peeking out of the earth, but it looked rather more as though he was chopping at the lush shoots themselves. In fact, the basket at his side was full of roots and bulbs and tender little plants that he had dug up and discarded there.

  ‘Are you having a change?’ I said, nodding at it.

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘Lady Love had some fanciful notions about what would grow, and it never mattered how many times her latest effort got frosted off or washed out, she was just as bad the next year with those blessed catalogues. I got that sick of her mourning over some spindly wee thing I could have told her was too tender for up here.’

  That did not accord at all with what Lady Love had said, but I was familiar with how two gardeners were wont to bicker over a shared patch. Broth cooks were nothing to them.

  ‘What’s that you’re grubbing out?’ I said.

  ‘Ach, something with a tongue-twister of a name,’ McReadie said. ‘I’m planting some primrose for now and I’m bringing on some petunias for later. They’ll do without a lot of fuss.’

  ‘Jolly good,’ I said. ‘Speaking of bringing things on, McReadie, can you point Mr Osborne and me in the direction of something that might be ready for cutting, please? We were thinking of visiting Lavinia’s grave.’

  ‘What about some boughs of apple blossom?’ Alec said. ‘What could be better?’

  McReadie rose up onto his knees and fired off a volley of Gaelic. Alec took a step back. McReadie cleared his throat and touched his cap. ‘You’ll forgive me,’ he said. ‘But these are pruned to a principle. There’s no “boughs” can just be lopped off. Go in the far end of the hothouse and help yourself to lilies and glads.’

  Alec and I beat a hasty retreat and before we were many yards away we heard the slice and scrape of McReadie’s trowel digging into the earth once more.

  ‘That is very strange, if you ask me,’ Alec said. ‘I wonder if the family know he’s grubbing out Lady Love’s last ever spring garden. Don’t you think it odd, Dandy?’

  ‘Grief is a strange thing,’ I said. ‘I would have expected him to nurture it, it’s true. Perhaps even think kindly of her optimism and do his best to make it work this year. But what I think is interesting is the rage. If he really believed a passing tramp killed his mistress would he be as upset and confused as to hit out at her plants? Or is he … promise you won’t laugh … is he laying waste to a bit of Applecross because he believes Applecross – someone at Applecross – is responsible?’

  ‘He’s a gardener,’ said Alec. ‘Not an Austrian psychologist.’

  ‘He’s a man who knew Lady Love from when they were children together,’ I said. ‘And it’s not as though he could tell anyone, if he harbours suspicions. He and his wife, and his son most of all, are still dependent on the very people he must suspect.’

  We had reached the hothouse door and Alec held it open for me to enter.

  ‘Although he certainly is a gardener,’ I said. Look at this!’

  A true Victorian, I had seen some impressive hothouses in my life but this was a marvel. The staging along the walls was six shelves deep and every shelf was crammed with bright fleshy plants, and huge garish flowers, so that one’s eyes were assaulted with colour. It heaved with life, the p
lants seeming to pulse, although that must have been just the heat and the humidity. I pulled my hat down over my ears to save my hair a bit.

  Alec had taken a pair of shears from a hook by the door and was snipping them in the air.

  ‘Which ones are lilies?’ he said. ‘And what are “glads”?’

  I pointed out some thick stalks of striped Turk’s caps and a few spears of gladioli that were just about to burst into full flower.

  There was a back gate out of the garden, as Lord Ross had told me. It led to a path past a neat brick cottage I took to be the McReadies’ and, after a short steep rise, out of the trees onto heathland. I looked up the hill with my hand across my eyes to shade them from the sun. It was going to be quite a climb to the family plot, even with Bunty dragging me. I took a deep breath and put my best foot forward.

  ‘Where have you stashed our book of hours?’ Alec said after a few minutes. He sounded out of breath. ‘Under lock and key, I hope.’

  I grunted. He knew I disliked the nickname he had given my notebook for this case. It was blasphemous to my ears. But when I tried to say as much, he teased me; saying my few days in a convent a year or two back had made me terribly pious all of a sudden. The book of hours – I could reluctantly agree that it was a good title for the document – had taken me a week of hard brain-racking and quite a few sessions of memory exercises that were almost hypnosis, but in the end I had filled in everything I knew about the day, night and morning around Lady Love’s death. I had a fair idea of who was where when and I had left gaps to fill when we gleaned more. It would have been incendiary reading for any one of the Dunnochs, innocent or guilty, and so it was locked in my writing case, which was locked in my dressing case, which was locked in Hugh’s gun bag in his dressing room.

  ‘Have you added anything to it since we got here?’ Alec said.

  ‘Ssshh,’ I said. ‘I hear voices.’

  Alec took a couple of big steps up the verge at the side of the track and held onto the capstones of the drystone dyke to see over to where the voices seemed to be drifting from.